Quote

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

John Fowles

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Despise
Mask
Green
Failure
Short
Masks
Greatest
Impotence
Effort
Cope
Cynicism

More quotes by John Fowles

Image
Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
John Fowles
Image
Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
John Fowles
Image
The dead live. How do they live? By love.
John Fowles
Image
Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
John Fowles
Image
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
John Fowles
Image
Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
John Fowles
Image
I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
John Fowles
Image
The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.
John Fowles
Image
Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
Image
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
John Fowles
Image
Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
John Fowles
Image
She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
John Fowles
Image
If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles
Image
The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
John Fowles
Image
He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
Image
Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles
Image
All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
John Fowles
Image
I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
John Fowles
Image
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
Image
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John Fowles